Savio Rodrigues points out that top 2000 companies will likely end up closing a deal with Microsoft, but out of that niche he sees a business opportunity for ISVs, System Integrators and also Microsoft’s partners. Leif Lodahal, project coordinator in the Danish OpenOffice.org project, sees Sun’s absence from the Danish market as an opportunity.

ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications are not integrated with OpenOffice.org yet. IT vendors tend to integrate with third parties applications when those applications get adopted by the early majority. Microsoft built its Office System partnerships network in years, and Sun should just do the same. Communities can help gathering public attention on missing integrations, since IT vendors especially big ones are sensitive to what people say. All in all partnership programs drain resources

A variety of different small integrations maybe needed to fully fulfill customers’ needs, ranging from migrating simple Access applications to the integration of custom applications importing or exporting spreadsheets. I have been reading reports talking about average migration time per document, but customers need predictable results.

About the Editor

Roberto has over 24 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he also served on some advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. He works at SourceForge, and opinions expressed here don't necessarily represent employer's positions, strategies, or opinion.